Nor in South Carolina after a white police officer fatally shot fleeing Walter Scott, a 50-year black man, in 2015.

Nor in South Carolina after a 20-year-old white supremacist massacred nine African-Americans in a historic church in South Carolina in 2015.

They marched in 1917. Thousands of black men, women and children paraded on New York's Fifth Ave., their silence screaming about lynchings and other murderous white-on-black violence. A sign addressed to President Woodrow Wilson pleaded, "Give me a chance to live, Mr. President."

At another time, African-Americans in New York complained over and over to no avail that the NYPD had subjected them to unconstitutional searches. They raised voices not in the stop-and-frisk era of the 21st century but in the 1930s, when cops warred on the numbers game, illegal precursor to today's lottery.

At another time, pondering how Harlem had blossomed into a vibrant black community, the great writer James Weldon Johnson asked, "Will the Negroes of Harlem be able to hold it?"

He answered, "When colored people do leave Harlem, their homes, their churches, their investments and their businesses, it will be because the land has become so valuable they can no longer afford to live on it."

That was in 1930. Consider how Harlem is changing today.

Often it is said that those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Yet far too many Americans of all backgrounds know far too little about what came before. Some are simply uninterested — while the yesterdays of some were deliberately kept incomplete.

For much of U.S. history, white America suppressed or ignored the lives, suffering and accomplishments of people exiled into a separate society and oppressed because of their skin color.

The voids extend 350 years, from the arrival of the first African slaves in the early 17th century well into at least the mid-20th.

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It wasn't until then that colleges and universities scrambled to offer black history courses.

It wasn't until then that major U.S. publishers produced biographies and autobiographies of blacks in any substantial number.

In 1926, historian Carter G. Woodson confronted the consequences of the great blank in the annals of the U.S. He wrote: "If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated."

Thus was born Black History Week, set in February, the month that marks the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 1976, President Gerald Ford expanded the week to Black History Month. Monday marks its 2016 start.

Often the month is called a celebration. And it surely is, because it honors the fortitude of human beings who fought to overcome, sometimes to stand alone with dignity, sometimes to collectively tear and repair the very fabric of America.

But the month is more than a celebration, more than an overwhelmingly agonizing yet often often inspiring look back at the broad story of one race and the stories of individual members.

Those who criticize the month as separatist, pandering and unnecessary stop there, with objecting whites going further to define it as a them-not-us celebration.

No. Not at all. For Black History Month is really a call on all to reckon with the indicting truth that, as set down on this continent, black history exists only because of the actions of the dominant — white — society in which Africans, not yet Americans, forcibly found themselves.

Since then, the stories of black and white have been inextricably interwoven, regardless of how much the white power structure denied blacks the ability to tell their history, while also refusing to memorialize it on paper, in recordings and on film.

So, along with celebration, there is shame, yearning for things lost, and, yes, pride in the wrenching progress America has made with more still to go.

The lesson of Black History Month is that, inescapably, that future will be shaped by a past that all should know in order to minimize mistakes that repeat, changed in degree but not in kind.